Cathy and Paul Keddy, biologists and nature lovers, spent 40 years saving and borrowing to buy a square mile of Lanark County’s most natural land.

Now they have given it legal protection as a nature sanctuary for 999 years.

Part is an outright gift of land to a conservation trust. Mostly the land can stay in private hands, but without the right to develop it — a crucial protection as it is close to fast-growing Carleton Place.

“If I’m going to be run down by a bus on Rideau Street,” Paul said, “I’ll lie there waiting for the ambulance and be able to say, ‘All the salamanders and frogs and herons and ducks are looked after.’ ”

Paul is the author of books on wetland conservation, and he and Cathy own 70 hectares of provincially significant wetland within the overall 280 hectares.

They could sell for a bundle — “millions,” Paul says, perhaps with optimism. But they bought the land in the first place to keep it natural, and they still feel it must stay that way.

They have a two-part deal with the Mississippi Madawaska Land Trust Conservancy. Part of their land is donated to the trust, and the rest has a “conservation easement” that doesn’t convey title but does restrict development.

“It is a wonderful property that has several different ecosystems,” said Mary Vandenhoff of the Conservancy. “It will only get better. It will never be developed.”

But how the Keddys signed away their rights makes sense only after they tell how they acquired the land.

They started slowly. Paul and Cathy were grad students at Halifax’s Dalhousie University in 1975, soon to be married. On a visit home to Ontario they walked onto this remote, 40-hectare lot for sale near his parents’ home, “and it sounded like mating dinosaurs,” he recalls.

Bullfrogs?

“Herons! Thirty pairs of blue herons had taken over this beaver pond, and there were chicks everywhere and squawking, and we just looked at each other and said, ‘If we don’t buy this, something awful is going to happen to it.’ So we bought that 100 acres (40 hectares),” with its maple-beech forest and two big ponds.

They didn’t live on it but camped there on weekends, and as the years passed they built a small cabin for more comfortable visits.

“It’s a square piece of land,” he said. “It’s big enough that if you go out for a walk, you can have a full day’s walk on it without really coming to an edge. You’re not bumping into neighbours and their land-use decisions.

“It’s almost like a little piece of Algonquin Park: rocky, rolling, gneiss outcrops.” (Gneiss is a type of rock, and soil found with it is acidic and poor in nutrients, making the land useless for farming.)

Still, they wondered what would happen if development arrived next door.

“As we got to know the property better, we found a stream that flowed to the east, and a patch of wild orchids in a seepage area. We owned neither. But over time, these properties came on the market, and we added them to our debt load,” Cathy Keddy said.

The biggest acquisition was nearly 160 hectares. A previous owner had sold it to a logging company that cut nearly everything, but at least this brought the price down. And the loggers left behind some sections of mature oak, so it’s growing back slowly as a mixed-aged forest. There are also more ponds, and a big stand of century-old hemlocks. (Keddy cored some to count rings.)

A naturalist friend told them, “You know, you have more land than many provincial parks.” It’s bigger than Rideau River, Silver Lake or Sharbot Lake parks.

As a curiosity, “The old shoreline of the Champlain Sea wanders through this property and you can almost follow it,” Paul said. The Champlain Sea lasted for a few thousand years after the last ice age until the land rose gradually and the salt water drained down the St. Lawrence River.

The whole square mile gives them sounds you don’t get in the city, or even near a rural highway.

“Spring peepers and grey tree frogs,” Paul says. “That will be the background. And then there will be some birds in the background” — thrushes and warblers. There will also be calls from owls and an osprey that probably fishes in Mississippi Lake.

“If we hadn’t bought it, we no doubt could have had some lovely cruises down the Danube and the Amazon. It has cut into our travel budget, that’s for sure. But on the other hand, we could walk outside our front door instead of having to bundle ourselves into the car and driving to the Gatineaus.”

The Keddys finally built a house there around 2000, though for some years they were in Louisiana where Paul Keddy taught. His health was poor, so he left the University of Ottawa when the University of Louisiana offered to let him to teach part-time and continue his writing. He studied coastal restoration there.

“Now I’m what you would call an independent scholar. I’m still writing books, but not in the classroom regularly,” he said. A recent book published by Cambridge University Press is a textbook on wetland conservation.

But he draws a line between studying and enjoying nature.

“Here is how I handle it: People are surprised, but I did no research here. This (living in the forest) was simply to experience nature without having to use my intellect.” That left him free to enjoy a walk in the woods without turning pleasure into an object of study.

“I’ve used this as a refuge from that. I’ve now been out here longer than Thoreau was at Walden,” he said, a reference to noted philosopher Henry David Thoreau who wrote about his experiences in the woodlands of Massachusetts.

People often want to leave their children money. Paul Keddy says, “We can leave more to our children than cash. I’ve talked this over with my sons. They get to see the place where they have happy memories left as it is.”

As well, there’s a little land where their sons could still build as long as they leave the bulk of the property untouched. And Paul and Cathy Keddy will still live there.

The agreement lasts for 999 years, he said, “and I checked the fine print, and here’s the funny thing: It’s renewable.”

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